Yeah, McClellan is basically in the standard of the field where he is responding to bad mythicist arguments to educate the public against them and otherwise would agree with the vast majority of mythicist premises. He doesn’t engage with it often.

I really haven’t seen McLellan do much beyond repeat the consensus. Ehrman has no excuse though.

More importantly, McGrath knows I do not base the non-existence of Jesus on just what Paul says about visions. So he cannot claim to have misread this sentence anyway. He reviewed Historicity so he knows my argument follows on nine bodies of evidence spanning extrabiblical evidence and Acts, and several different items of evidence in the Epistles (also as replicated in tables in Paradigm as a reminder, so he can’t claim to have forgotten).

Moreover, he knows I base it on abundant other data in Paul’s epistles (e.g. a whole section compares Paul’s statements with Ignatius in Paradigm, pp. 259ff., which in bold lists six specific items, only one of which the indicated vision material, and all of which is discussed in more detail throughout the book), and on the Gospel data for the priors (a whole chapter in Paradigm explains that, even updating the results), and on unraveling evidence for historicity (five whole chapters in Paradigm, including the Gospel/oral lore matter McGrath himself mentions, forgetting that he listed another reason I added for doubting historicity, and much else in chapters two through four, despite McGrath claiming Jesus stands on the very arguments that in those chapters I prove it can’t, again contradicting himself as to what my argument is).

So McGrath cannot honestly make the argument he did even if he somehow couldn’t read one syllogistic sentence correctly. He already knows what he is saying is false.

So you are saying even you mistook a description of the risen Jesus as a description of the pre-risen Jesus, in a sentence that specifically contrasts that one with the other?

That astonishes me.

//

Objective historians today must admit there was
**** no resurrected Jesus ****
no animated corpse rose from the grave to hang out and have dinner with his followers.
**** That man is not historical ****
Yet he became so, within a mere generation or two. And the original, mythical version
**** of him ****
(who was entirely imaginary, as Paul reveals in Galatians 1:11–16 and 1 Corinthians 15:3–8)
was erased.
But if a ‘historical’
**** Risen Jesus ****
could be invented, and
**** that version ****
narratively erase the original (the one of mere fleeting dreams and visions),
then so could
**** a ‘historical’ Jesus prior to that ***
be invented, and
**** that version ****
narratively erase the original.

//

Where are you confused?

The warning shot came from beyond even him. In Paradigm I cite several scholars making the same point. Probably the most shocking is Lester Grabbe, “The Case of the Corrupting Consensus,” in Between Evidence and Ideology (Brill, 2010), 83–92.

“Was that moving object in the distance a bird or a plane? No wait, it was Superman!”

I’m confused, did you mean it was a bird?

McGrath is not “folks”, nor is the field. McGrath’s failure to read it properly and to steelman it as both of you did is the problem here.

Worse, McGrath is also strawmanning on a second level Richard is mentioning. Richard doesn’t just argue that Paul dreamed of Jesus: He argues that Paul describes only dreaming of Jesus, never meeting him in person, and, more critically, never discussing a single matter of the man that would require he have ever been alive.

This is why the “brothers of the Lord” line is essential: it’s one of the only things in Paul that would, read according to conventional dogma, give even the slightest indication that Jesus was a guy on Earth who had any kind of mundane social connections. And that one is bizarre precisely because it’s Paul talking about how he “only” met Peter and the guy he is claiming to have had a vision from in order to learn the cultic truth’s “brother”, which, if it were a biological brother, would be something Paul would have to not elide but explicitly discuss (“And as we all know, the Lord had a fraught relationship with his adoptive brothers in the flesh, and thus they were not even apostles”).

So it’s not just that Paul discusses meeting Jesus in a dream, which, of course, Richard puts into the context of schizotypal hallucination, unambiguously. It’s that Richard points out that this is the only way Paul discusses anyone meeting the Lord.

Put that way, McGrath’s little driveby doesn’t remotely cut it. And that one is one Richard has had to repeat ad nauseum, such that no reasonable person responding to him who had done an ounce of homework could have an excuse as to misunderstand.

And, of course, given that we can all agree that the paragraph as written clearly makes the “If the risen Jesus could be imagined, why not the historical one?” line, McGrath had no excuse to not e-mail Richard for clarification if he had an ounce of uncertainty.

So this is still dirty pool, no matter how much we bend over backwards.

I’m hoping it was a joke?

Bart Ehrman has a believing wife active in her denomination, I think that explains the original failling. He has since invested so much that he can’t very well reverse himself; he has too much invested. Dan McCllellan is a believing Mormon active in his Church; he poisons his own well very well. Very sad, but I’ve yet to encounter a credentialed “atheist” myther of any stripe that doesn’t still have their own personal Jesus still living rent-free in their heads. In poesy ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on‘; the reality seems otherwise.

But confused we are. Ergo “No one could possibly be confused as you claim. The argument is very clear. Its premises and flow and distinctions are very clear.” is simply wrong.. You can’t conceive of folk understanding the world other than you do yourself; it is a very common conceit; but a conceit for all that.